.png)
The Wash Bros Podcast
Join The Wash Bros, Matt Jackson and Clay Smith, as they talk friendship, business, and how working together as owner/operators of competing businesses has helped them achieve even greater success.
The Wash Bros Podcast
Season 2: Episode 13: Know Your Worth
Struggling to price your pressure washing services? Feeling pressure to match those ultra-low $199 specials you see advertised everywhere? This eye-opening conversation between industry veterans Matt Jackson and Clay Smith tackles the epidemic of underpricing that's holding back pressure washing businesses across the country.
Matt and Clay dive deep into the psychology of pricing, revealing why the fear of losing jobs to competitors drives business owners into a dangerous race to the bottom. They share candid insights about their own pricing journey, explaining how they've built a business model where $500+ is their standard job price during busy seasons. Rather than apologizing for premium rates, they've created a value proposition that makes customers happy to pay more.
The hosts break down exactly why those tempting $199-$250 jobs are actually business killers. From sky-high insurance costs to equipment maintenance, fuel expenses, and the need to build capital for future growth, they deliver a masterclass in understanding the true cost of running a legitimate pressure washing operation. As Clay pointedly asks, "If I were to go and do a $200 job, that's completely wasting our time... so why would I do that?"
Beyond just the numbers, this episode explores the qualitative difference between budget-hunting and quality-seeking customers. Matt shares how building a portfolio of 300+ Google reviews has created a reputation that allows them to charge premium rates while still earning enthusiastic five-star feedback. They explain why customers actually leave better reviews when paying higher prices, contrary to what many business owners assume.
Whether you're just starting out or looking to level up an established pressure washing business, this conversation provides the mindset shift and practical strategy you need to stop undervaluing your work. Follow their advice to break free from the treadmill of low-margin jobs and build a sustainable business that rewards your expertise, investment, and professionalism.
Want more business-building insights? Subscribe to the Wash Pros podcast and follow Matt and Clay on YouTube and Instagram to continue learning from their combined decades of industry experience.
https://www.facebook.com/WASHBROSPODCAST
https://www.facebook.com/mattdrivewayguy
https://www.facebook.com/c3pressure
powerwashingcoach.com
C3washpros.com
mattthedrivewayguy.com
what's up, guys? It's matt jackson and clay smith and we are the wash rose. Welcome to episode 13. This time we're going to dive into pricing and, uh, how to really like price based upon what you're worth and how to even know your worth. So you want to take this thing off, clay as?
Speaker 2:always, I don't mind at all. First of all, as always, I want to appreciate everybody for listening in. Thanks for tuning in. Whether it be YouTube, spotify, apple Podcasts, anything of that nature, obviously we're about everywhere, on every platform. Today, we're going to talk about how to stop undervaluing yourself, how to stop undervaluing your work, how to stop, I mean, just undervaluing anything that has to do with your business, right? So one of the biggest things that undervaluing happens is just the fear of losing a job to a competitor, right? So, whether it be Facebook groups, I see a lot of guys in our area they're all over the Facebook groups advertising these really cheap prices. And you know, maybe you've been on Facebook too much, maybe you've been inhaling too much on the internet, maybe you've been seeing these guys all over the internet advertising these $199 prices, and sometimes I feel like we get caught up in the wrong things and it messes with our mentality a little bit.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And people don't care about the price, they care about the value they see in you. Because I've pressure washed and Clay's pressure washed and I think it's the same job or the same house of somebody that has thrown a clip flyer with the price already marked on it and we were over a hundred dollars more than that price and it's a small ticket. So, of a job that we charged 300 something dollars for, somebody went in and said we can do this for 200 bucks. So like that's not how it works, that's the whole. Oh, I'm the upsell guy, I'm like the low ticket. Like if you're too low ticket, you're going to be noise to somebody because they're like, why am I going to hire that guy who's just throwing trash in my driveway? Why am I going to hire the guy who's the cheapest guy? Like what's, like that's, there's no value there.
Speaker 1:So like one thing with us is we always learn, like we try to understand. Like, ok, what does our value mean? The value means like, how booked up are we? If I'm really needing work, I have less value. So If I'm really needing work, I have less value. So if somebody is saying, okay, I need to have my house pressure washed and you know you can be aggressive and get that job. That's how you should price it. But as we get into the season, like we're in now with May, where we're booked out a week, two weeks, full of, like multiple crews and trucks, like we better be hitting that like $500 plus price point per job, otherwise we're undervaluing ourselves and that's kind of what Clay and I mean. Like if you're, if you're, stuck chasing $200 jobs, you'll forever be stuck chasing $200 jobs. You're not going to attract those best clients, the ideal client that you want.
Speaker 2:And another thing I know that me and you had talked about uh earlier in the day, or maybe earlier in the week, I don't remember. We have a lot of conversation, but the biggest thing that I fear, as a business owner myself, is okay, you don't want to be so cheap that it bites you in the ass in the long run, right? So you don't want the customer popping up in three years saying well, you only did it for $250 or $199 last time. Why are you trying to charge me $400 or $500 to do the same service?
Speaker 1:Exactly right, because you will get busy being cheap because there's plenty of cheap people out there. There's so many more Toyotas sold than Porsches. You don't want to be the Toyota because that's a commodity and then it's a race to the bottom. You see, the people buy Porsches for more than MSRP because there's value in them, they're sought after. People buy Toyotas at less invoice pricing because it's just about moving units.
Speaker 1:You can say, okay, I'm busy, I'm doing this much, but if I'm only charging so much money and I have so many stops per day, I'm going to burn myself out.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to be able to handle any business issues that come up, whether it be taxes, whether it be insurance rates climbing.
Speaker 1:Because if you guys are legitimate businesses and carry workman's comp insurance, carry liability insurance, carry professional commercial truck and vehicle insurance, like that's going to eat you up and I don't see how you guys can afford doing jobs for under $300 minimum. And and then too, like what happens when you want to hire somebody, you're going to just say oh well, I'm going to do a $200 job, I'm going to pay a guy $20, $25 an hour to do that job and then you're making negative money on that. So it's like Clay's saying is important is, if you're new or if you're in it for a little while, to get your pricing situated first, because you don't want to have a customer base full of $200 pressure washers, pressure washing jobs, and then, when you raise your prices to 400 bucks, those people leave you because they're just interested in you because of that 200 price point yes, and I believe that's the true beauty of making sure that you finding your value and stop undervaluing yourself with your prices.
Speaker 2:So, um, the biggest thing is knowing, knowing your true cost of doing business. Like, what are you spending on gas today? I like to break it down by the day and then kind of break it down by the week, and then from my week I can break it down by the week and then from my week I can break it down by the month. So figure out how much your budget is a day or how much for gas, your true cost of business, your maintenance. Put money aside. Say, okay, if a hose blows on me today, I have this money here to you know, be able to go and do that right. So if you're doing $199 house washes, it's going to be tough, like it's going to hurt when you have a $200 hose blow right. So if per se, I went and bought two new pressure washers last year. I got tired of dicking around with two that were giving me trouble. Like you want to be able to go and do that if something goes down, so you're not missing out on work.
Speaker 1:Exactly right and as I was growing, I was trying to get everything I could. And, yeah, I think it's great, as you grow your business, you get your brand out there. You are like getting great Google reviews, you're getting word of mouth. But it's important as we kind of go back to what Clay was saying is, you don't want to be word of mouth in a Facebook group where people are looking for the bottom dollar customer. And Clay had a post today on his personal Facebook I don't know if you guys have seen it or saw it. Essentially he said it's funny, where I have $60,000 invested in equipment, I pay professional insurances and people want the bottom dollar price and it's like, hey, you can't get both. You want the cheapest. It's going to be a high school kid, the job's going to be crap and you're not going to. You're not going to pay a lot of money but you're going to get less than if you just hire somebody like Clay or I and hire somebody the right way.
Speaker 1:And I feel like on social media, people all the time are asking hey, does anybody know a good pressure washer? I was like they ask these questions so often. They're looking for somebody cheap. They're looking for somebody desperate that's wanting to jump on them and DM them and give them a best price, and then you're going to be one of five guys and it's going to be a race to the bottom. So that's one of those deals I don't even really deal with on my end because I think that lowers the value of our brand.
Speaker 1:And we have customers that are willing to pay $1,000 plus for us to service their home and they're not going to think twice about somebody coming in and trying to undercut us.
Speaker 1:As you get more volume and busier, it's like this is the time of year where we're literally getting we're talking Clay and I were talking and we're getting like 20 inbound reaches between phone calls and emails and quotes.
Speaker 1:So like, if you're getting that much lead volume coming through, you sift through and you say what is my value worth? These high-end customers who view us, who like us from our social media or they see all of our Google reviews, or they have good word of mouth, or we've done work for them in the past they're they're saying no problem, thousand dollars, pressure wash my house, do the windows, do the driveway, perfect, five-star review. These are the customers that we keep and we farm and and that's where our value comes from. It doesn't come from saying sorry, customer, we're booked out three months because we're taking on every two hundred dollar job and that's the problem I see guys do. They get stuck chasing whatever's coming at them and usually it's low dollar tickets and it's not moving the needle. And if you don't know your numbers, you can be making revenue but you're not making profit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it all boils to in your pricing. You can kind of gauge your business off of your speed, your reliability, the equipment that you have, and I think that's the biggest kicker is knowing how fast you can work but also maintaining the quality. And then you can kind of plan your day. You can plan your week and figure out okay, I can do 20 jobs in a week or I can do four jobs in a day, I can do five jobs in a day and that's kind of how I do it. Right, I know that I can go out and I can watch an average home to a basic house washing in 45 minutes to an hour. So I know that I can do four to five of those, depending on logistics, where they're scheduled, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And all of that goes into pricing what you're worth. And just don't want to say like when, when we're getting gas in the morning I got two trucks getting gas. We're filling up the pressure washer, we're filling up diesel in the Ford and we're filling up gas in the Chevy truck. Like it's a lot of money, it isn't something I'm spending 200 bucks before I go to the bleach store and then buy a drum of bleach for $260.
Speaker 1:So it isn't like right off the bat we're spending four or $500. So if I were to go and do a $200 job, that's completely wasting our time. So that's why it's really important to say okay, we gotta be making a lot of money on each job, maximizing how much we're making per job, because there is gonna be a time where a truck goes out. Oh, you wanna invest in a wrap. Okay, you wanna invest in advertising to get better customers. This is not even factoring in what we're trying to make personally. After after all of our expenses.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are like oh, $100,000. Cool, that literally pays your business to move forward. You need to get past that stage so you can afford living life yourself and this can be a true business and you're not stuck in this kind of hamster wheel of part time that you see a lot of people live in and we're kind of talking about it a little bit on our last episode and previous episodes of that. Like, don't be stuck on the treadmill of part-time and not taking risks. You're not investing in yourself and raising your brand and growing this as a business as it should Like, if you're gonna be half-ass and lukewarm, it's doing nobody any good. So it's if you're charging, if you're taking on everybody just to be busy, just to say, oh, look at me, I'm, I'm doing all these jobs, I'm, I can help everybody, you're doing yourself a disservice, your customers is disservice, and if you ever have employees, you're doing them a disservice.
Speaker 2:I agree with that. And then, once you get on the value that the value we're talking about, value so much. I think we're talking about value, but we are talking about value, but you get what I'm saying. Anyway, once you get to the point of where we're at, as far as the level that we're at in business, you get to, you find that you're competing on value or on price, right?
Speaker 2:So my thing is I try to create a great reputation online. I try to say, hey, mr or Mrs Customer, they probably had a bad experience and they're calling me and they're they're scared, they're asking a million questions and I'm like hey, mr or Mrs Smith, hey, we have 300 and some Google reviews online. Why don't you go take a look at our work? Why don't you go take a look at what other people have to say? And that provides value to people, versus some guy that's just come out of the woodworks and saying that they're the best, they have the best equipment, they bought a $30,000 rig, they slapped the logo on their truck, they look legit, but there's nothing there. You can't find anything about them online. And I think that that online reputation, if you could do a good job of building that. It takes a lot of time but eventually it starts to pay off and customers see that and they'll pay $50 to $100 for you. You know, then, the guy that doesn't really have anything online and there's there's no track record no doubt.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of like when we deal with these customers where it's a super small job and we say, hey, we have a minimum place of three or four hundred dollars, they're gonna, they're gonna. They're gonna say, okay, well, do I want to hire this guy? And that's where your, your value as a company really comes in. Are they looking just to have their driveway clean for the lowest bidder? That's where you weed these people out on the front end. Hey, I have a minimum, it's going to be this much money. They're going to say, yes, I want to do business with you, I will pay that premium price to have that service done. Or they're going to say, no, thanks, I'm going to the next person.
Speaker 1:If you allow them to lower your standards and lower your value and you take money off the table just because you want to have that one customer, you're allowing the customer to dictate how you run your business, and that is a very low value trait and it's one of those reasons why you get bad customers.
Speaker 1:These people just want to take advantage of you. They can kind of almost smell like a sucker and I think in the Facebook post that Clay that clay made, a couple people commented where they're like people sense the energy of a weak negotiator or a weak person or somebody that's so like insecure in their value that they just let people walk all over them. And you're not doing anybody a good service and you'll probably get a bad review too. It's. It's amazing like people leave better reviews paying more money than if they were getting a cheap job done, because they see the value they're going to pay for that. Wow, this guy was delivered a premium service. Here's a five-star review. So if you guys think, oh, you got to be super cheap, you got to break your back and do everything that is not right at all and you're lowering your value, so don't do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my biggest thing is I always try to offer. I don't really try to offer, but what I try to do is I try to provide value. I always try to provide value to the customer. Hey, I've done X amount of jobs. We have professional equipment. We have 300 Google reviews. Check us out online. We're on TV. You can see us on Channel 7. And all of those are things that are providing value. The customer feels like they know you before you ever step out to their house and they're excited to see you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Like I was at Home Depot the other day getting plants for my garden. That's never-ending and I had my T-shirt on that had Matt the driveway guy on the back of it and the guy's like it's like Matt the driveway guy, it looks like a Matt the driveway guy shirt and I'm like it's like matt the driver guy. That looks like a matt the driver guy shirt.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, yeah, and he's like I've used you a few years ago and I was like cool, thanks it was kind of almost like an awkward situation.
Speaker 1:but he was like you guys do good work. I was like, nice, that's an example of having your brand out there building value. And and like a guy sees another, a person with a t-shirt on of a pressure washing company that he used a couple years ago and there's enough value built there that he said hey to me he's like, oh, cool, and that's the objective you guys want to have. And, like Clay says, with social media, these people follow you. You think, oh, I did this guy's house four or five years ago. He doesn't know what's going on, but he could be a big fan on Facebook or social media or see you on the news media or see you on the news. And people have reached out and they're like, oh, it's cool to see you grow. Or it's like it's cool to see your kid stuff like that.
Speaker 1:And that's why you got to put your branding forward and put your marketing forward and always, always be adding value, whether it's directly selling a customer or just keeping, keeping your leads and keeping your customer base warm. One thing we did this past week was send out another email blast. So we have the 2000 something contacts with emails in our CRM and we just blast out. We did one in February to kind of kickstart the preseason sales and we just recently did one in May just to remind everybody. Hey, like it's that time of year, here's a button, click here, get the quote. And we've had a lot of people who are like, yeah, I'm ready, thanks for letting me know, thanks. Had a lot, of a lot of people who are like yeah, I'm ready, thanks for letting me know, thanks for reminding me.
Speaker 1:And it's part of adding value is not being reactive to people, it's it's saying hey, mr customer, like we've done business two or three years ago, I'd like to earn your business again and just an act of that, you're able to sell at a higher price point than if you were just a bag on a post on facebook where there's 50 other guys responding to the same thing, because you're going to literally be competing with people who have no idea what they're doing and have equipment that is nothing close to what you guys have so like, figure out what pond you want to fish in and be the best person you can be in that pond yeah, another thing with these uh facebook posts is, uh, it's always like scraping the bottom of the barrel, right.
Speaker 2:So I feel like that, these customers, when you eventually do get them it's just my experience when I first started, because I did a lot of the facebook stuff those customers feel like they, they can run over you. They feel like they, right, they basically grabbed you by the balls. It's like they're going to get the most they can out of you for that price, because they know that. You know that you are up against all those other people, right. So you're you have the fear of this is calling the other, you know. So you just got to make sure you're just providing that value. I don't worry about that stuff anymore because I don't really care, right, if I'm losing a hundred dollars, whatever, I'm not going to do it all, right, then you're either going to use me or you're not yep, and by allowing yourself to be open and and serve your better clients at higher price points.
Speaker 1:Like I did a, we did a storage facility, uh, early this week, soft washing couple storage units and like a car wash section. It was like a 1200 job. I think we banged it out in like four and a half five hours. It's pretty easy. The guy's like, hey, uh, like great service, like quality work and a reasonable price, and I got a five-star review and that was 300 250 dollar an hour project. That was pretty fun. I was booking jobs on my phone half the day. Those are the type of customers you want. Now I have other customers where you're, they're beating you up over a 300 job on cleaning patio furniture and like you got to separate the two. You got to figure out okay, who, how's my customer, how's, how's my company best set up? Do I have the right equipment? How efficient am I at cleaning stuff and what do I want to clean every single day and just plow forward on that and when somebody comes and says, hey, can you clean this thing, don't say yes, don't be that handyman, because that lowers your value there.
Speaker 2:It's like we want to be laser focused and we want to be a sniper here yeah, I had an older gentleman call me last week and he's like I need you to wash my house, but while you're up there, can you take these shutter downs for me? I'm like I do not take shutters down, sir, I just pressure wash, yep. So that's a good example. Just stick to your services and stick what you know. Don't start putting your hands in other things, no matter what it is yep and two, it's one of those things you can.
Speaker 1:An easy thing to say is look, my insurance doesn't cover that. If I get on your roof and I fall and I'm replacing your, your shutters on your roof, my insurance is not going to cover that. It's going to come back to you and you're going to get sued. Like do you want to call a handyman, a professional who's licensed for this, or do you want to have me get up there and try to do it and sue you? But again, they're just trying to see what they can take from you.
Speaker 2:They're like I don't want to call somebody I don't want to call somebody else, go get up there and do it yep, they're just trying to get that more bang for the buck, like what I was talking about earlier. Just know your value. I also had another incident today. It was going to spread out the top of her and, uh, very, very quickly that we're not a gutter cleaner. She needed to call a gutter guy yes, I, I don't do interior gutters.
Speaker 1:We both share the same guy who we throw work to just because it doesn't fit in our business model. And I tell customers all the time I'm like hey look, I pay this guy personally three hundred dollars, um three hundred dollars, to clean my house gutters. So you, that's about how much it's going to cost you on top of the house wash that we're doing to your house today, cause, like no matter how hard we could try to spray it out ourselves, unless you're on a ladder scooping it in with your hand, it's not worth it.
Speaker 2:Agree, because then you start blowing them out of the gutters. They blow everywhere, they blow all over the yard, they blow all in the bushes and then you got another problem. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:So that's. It goes back to knowing your value and setting the terms with your customer. You don't want the customer to determine how much they're going to pay you and you don't want the customer to determine, uh, your job scope. Because if, if, if you're saying, oh yeah, sure, just pay me. What's fair? Well, it's fair for you to work for free, because why should I pay you? Like you're not giving me a compelling reason to pay? You's like like people will try to find easy the most ways they can squeeze you as possible, unless you you give them a boundary. So know your worth, know your boundary and and weed out bad customers when everybody pressure washes. You don't want to be everybody, but yeah, we're like yeah, there's, there's so many others.
Speaker 2:There's no shortage of pressure washers. So know your value, set set your value, know your numbers, make sure you're working on that on-run reputation, yep.
Speaker 1:And understand that it's more important to have the right marketing, have the right business, than it is to know how to pressure wash. I can train a guy in one to two weeks to be a better pressure washer than most people out there. It's not that difficult. The difficulty is having that customer experience from the start on, having people see value in you and then running it as a business, because everybody can pressure wash, whether they're the 16 year old kid down the street with a four gallon a minute machine or somebody with a 16 gallon a minute machine. We're all doing the same job. So like it's how we treat the customer, how we position our business and how efficiently we knock down work and that pretty much sums it up.
Speaker 1:Matt Yep, I think. So you got anything to add.
Speaker 2:Clay, just make sure you continue to listen. We've got some more bangers coming out for you. I know that we've gotten a lot of great feedback from all the guys that have been in my inbox and I know that you've had some guys message you as well. Matt, it's been great with this journey. Make sure you're following us on YouTube, watch us on Instagram. If you have any questions, just reach out to us.
Speaker 1:Yep Sounds like a plan. We'll see you guys on the next one.
